Slow Learner

[Otto]

From: Jane Sweet
Sunday, April 29, 2001 12:37 AM
Re: Slow Learner

> >
> > Homoerotic Bonding as Escape from Heterosexual
> > Responsibility in Pynchon's Slow Learner.(Thomas Pynchon)
> > http://www.findarticles.com/m2342/3_34/70396388/p1/article.jhtml>
>
> "When we read the introduction ironically, we, like Pynchon
> himself, place the stories in a preOedipa(l) position." >
>
> Why would we read the Introduction ironically?


Because there is hardly another way of reading it . . .

Otto

"My first reaction, rereading these stories, was oh my God, accompanied by
physical symptoms we shouldn't dwell upon." (Pynchon, p. 3)

"If this introduction is, as the self-deprecating tone seems to indicate, an
ironic document, such as we might expect from the writer of V. and The
Crying of Lot 49,"
(Hawthorne, p. 2)

"Beginning from a modernist stance wherein he struggles through the
application of certain humanistic values and assumptions, he would discover
that those values and assumptions are themselves tenuous at best and support
their opposites at worst. The postmodern ironic detachment that follows this
apprenticeship grows from a desire to locate spaces that resolve the
inherent problems of modernism and humanism. If the introduction is, indeed,
an ironic evaluation of the stories, it illustrates what the postmodern
Pynchon learned and indeed communicates to the reader through the
stories--namely, that those sureties we most take for granted are themselves
social and psychological constructs that are themselves constructs of
earlier constructs."
(Hawthorne, p. 3)